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AGNC Investment, a mortgage real estate investment trust, is a creature of shadow and light. It purchases securities born of pooled mortgages, a dance of numbers and uncertainty. The investor, like a pilgrim in a foreign land, must grapple with the forces that shape its fate: interest rates, housing markets, and the fickle rhythm of repayment. Management, with its feverish calculations, seeks to outpace the cost of capital, yet the path is fraught with the weight of human frailty.

the relentless, unglamorous task of repairing that which refuses to remain whole. Even if the age of new construction slumbers, the labyrinth of malfunction, decay, and replacement ensures the company’s continuation, as if the swimming pool, once summoned into existence, condemned its owner to eternal recurrence of repair invoices.

ExxonMobil’s $43 billion grab for Pioneer Natural Resources in May 2024 was a swift, surgical move. Chevron, meanwhile, spent an extra year tangled in legal red tape over its $28 billion Hess acquisition. Why? Because in the oil business, even a change of ownership is a three-act play—with ExxonMobil playing the role of the grumpy neighbor who doesn’t want his backyard turned into a trampoline park.

No company wishes to be cast as the fool in this performance, for fear of being left behind in the so-called “AI race.” And who should they call upon but Nvidia, purveyor of those miraculous GPUs that power the data centers fueling this digital bacchanal? Indeed, their first-quarter revenue of $39.1 billion—a sum fit for a king—proves the insatiable appetite for computational might. Yet, let us not mistake gluttony for wisdom; such feasts often end in indigestion.

Yet, let us not be misled; Nvidia’s not the sole player reaping the bounty of this AI bonanza. No, sir. Big players like Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet have also seen their market caps swell past the $2 trillion mark like a balloon at a summer fair. Meanwhile, Apple—that old stalwart—still clings to its weighty valuation while playing catch-up in the AI realm.

Let us first turn our opera glasses toward subscriber growth—a performance less chamber music than outright burglary. AT&T, in a gesture of supreme opportunism that rivals a duchess switching allegiances at the whiff of a superior vintage, has parlayed Verizon’s price increases into 479,000 new retail postpaid supplicants, of whom 401,000 pledged their monthly oblations via the sacrament known as the mobile phone. There was, alas, a not wholly lamented shedding of 34,000 prepaid acolytes, but one does not mourn the departure of the uninvited from an exclusive salon.